I write speculative fiction (Science Fiction and Fantasy). Some of my stories are pure science fiction and some are Urban fantasies. Classic fantasy takes place in an imagined world. Urban fantasy grows out of real contemporary settings.
Fantasy is not the domain of children. Animated stories are elaborate cartoons. Children can neither write fantasy nor do they yet have enough life experience to enter its fictive dream, that state into which we fall when the story becomes real to us and we begin to live within it as we read. Fantasy is not fable, stories with a moral. Fantasy is more than talking animal stories, and neither is it allegory.
Despite the connotations of the English word, “fantasy” is not something to manipulate the credulity of the reader. Fantasy is a normal human ability, not something contrary or offensive to reason. Because good fantasy uses the human faculty of imagination to perceive reality, good fantasy is the opposite of escapism. It is the common experience of humankind that the beauty of nature itself often induces fantasy. And, fantasy is not just a story with a fairy-tale ending where everything turns out as it should, although the best fantasy must end that way, because fantasy is the true answer to our deepest human longing for all things to be put right.
In English, a spell means both a story and a power cast over a person. Fantasy transfers the reader into the fictive dream, not to a world of possibility but to one of desirability. The fantasy’s world has enough detail and its own consistent internal laws that the reader’s mind can enter it. It is not suspension of disbelief; it is a willing and full belief in the reality of that sub-created world. If the sub-creation is not perfectly believable, the reader falls out of the fictive dream and begins to regard the story from the outside. At that point, in order to stay “in” the story, the reader must ignore disbelief, a poor substitute for the fictive dream.
The human mind is capable of forming an image of something that does not exist anywhere in this world. This is imagination. Imagination makes concepts perceptible and is the organ of meaning. Fantasy is meaning’s true child born of imagination. It is our means of satisfying our intrinsic desire for marvel and for rightness and for making sense of it all.
Imagination is one of the two faculties of the human brain. The other brain function, rational thought, deals with the manipulating and storage of concepts. Imagination is what the mind uses to develop meaning. One of the traits of an effective teacher of high school math and science students is the ability to get students to work new concepts in their minds by making imaginative links to what they already know. Few teachers possess this crucial skill. Fantasy is a power and product of the imagination, just as thought is a power and product of the intellect. This is why math and science taught as nothing more than a series of concepts leave students forever hating math and science.
Imagination does not manipulate; it creates. Truth comes to us through the imaginative manipulation of things, through creating metaphors, through creating links. Real learning and discovery come from construction or creation of these links. In learning and in life, we truly encounter the world when we involve our imaginations. This is why we tend to contrast concept-filled schooling with the real life of love, dance, food, art, music, poetic imagination, nature, instinct, emotion, and the subjective.
Writers of fantasy are exhibiting the human desire to become sub-creators. Sub-creation is more than making story symbols or representations of things in this world and fantasy creatures are more than the personifications of nature, and their stories are more than allegories. Fantasy casts light on the world around us; it does not just reflect the world’s lights.
An effective fantasy is not easy to write. A writer who effectively creates a fantasy world is practicing story-making at its essence and in its most potent form. Urban Fantasy is built on the real world, is rational and not irrational, is set in a world of imaginative sub-creation not anti-reality, and is art, not dreams. The fantasy presents concepts and themes incarnate in the writer’s imagined world, in its geography and history, in its reality. The world built by the writer has a strong and consistent internal morality that is evident apart from any need for allegory. The author writes by feeling rather than thinking, directly embodying concrete experiences instead of describing an idea of the concept of those experiences. The sub-created world is outside time and is filled with eternal truths. The writer finds that the underlying mythological story was already there, an eternal verity; the writer fits the fantasy protagonist into it.
Fantasy is only possible within the realm of facts and truths. As our society falls into a state of denial, of fake news and alternative facts, of the rejection of science and the tribalism and lies of politics, we lose the ability to appreciate fantasy. And, fantasy abides only in the realm of written words and not of visual art. Animators have reduced fantasy to silliness because the characters are not imagined but are just viewed on a screen from the position of a spectator.
Fantasy remains our human right because we, like it, are the products of creation. The best fantasy addresses the unsatisfiable human longing for beauty that draws us in and keeps us there. It satisfies that desire, but it also whets it unbearably. To move into that sub-created world is, in the only real sense, to become enchanted. I invite you to come to Redondo, New Mexico, the setting for my stories, based on the real village of Jemez Springs, in the Land of Enchantment.
I believe that fantasy enables us to recover true sight of things as they really are, released from the grayness of their everyday use. When I found Jesus Christ as my Savior in 1965, the world itself looked to my new eyes crisp and bright and alive as I had never seen it before. It was as if I had been, like my father, color-blind but could suddenly perceive the full spectrum. The gray familiar things are those we have appropriated mentally as concepts and no longer see manipulated by imagination. It takes fantasy to change the everyday Coffee Room sign painted on the glass door into “mooreeffoc,” as we look from the inside of the shop outwards, as it was seen by Charles Dickens on a dark London day and as used by G.K. Chesterton to denote the new strangeness of things that had become gray. I write fantasy not to give sudden insights on some familiar things as viewed from a new angle but to present a world so entirely new that all the familiar things we store in mental blandness can fly away in a cloud.
The desire to be free to fly wherever, to delve the deepest sea, to no longer be held by this globe, to be able to converse with other creatures (animate and inanimate), to escape the curse of death, to live among promises kept and prohibitions rightly observed, these are the realities of fantasy. When the desire for all this is suddenly met at the fairy-tale ending, the reader has the sense that the world of the fantasy endures beyond the final page. These stories never end; they pause and they point to the never-ending blessedness that lies ahead. They are the slightest foretaste of what the first breath of Heavenly air will be when we open our eyes after closing them in death and know, it is Real! The Gospel stories of Jesus restoring limbs, life, hope, and forgiveness embrace all the essence of a fantasy story — but one that really happened historically in this world and continues on forever. Ultimately, fantasy only has meaning in its reflection of the Greatest of Stories, and the appreciation felt for a fantasy author is only a bit of the appreciation we feel deep inside for the great Storyteller and Creator who loves us.
See the page Great Fantasy for a glimpse into the mind of the founders of the genre.